Art League Lecture: Jim Griffioen

Dates: Wed Oct 9, 13

Time:
7:00pm

Location:
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

Jim Griffioen will launch the Art League's 59th lecture season with his illustrated program, The Disappearing City. During the evening he will share the stories behind his photographs, including photographs from his Feral Houses series. Following the program, the audience is invited to enjoy a coffee reception in the museum lobby.

Seven years ago, Kalamazoo native Jim Griffioen walked away from a promising career as a litigator at a large San Francisco law firm and moved to downtown Detroit. Since 2006 he has documented this turbulent period of the city's 300-year history with shocking photography and telling prose. Today thousands of readers follow his blog (Sweet Juniper) and many more have seen his photographs in publications like Harper's, Time, Vice, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Baffler, Foam, as well as in galleries across the nation. Griffioen studied English Literature at WMU, Trinity College Dublin, and law at the University of Michigan, but it was the non-traditional choice of staying home to care for his children while living in the heart of Detroit that led to his artistic career. Even while documenting the decay of Detroit's urban landscape, it is Griffioen's stories of the magic and beauty he finds in Michigan's largest city that bring his readers back time and time again.